Anita Rani meets the women who put up a fight

When the Woman’s Hour and Countryfile presenter Anita Rani was 14, she fell in love with a film. Bhaji on the Beach was a sharp, funny comedy-drama about three generations of British-Indian women on a day trip to Blackpool’s illuminations, directed by Gurinder Chadha, and written by the then up-and-coming actor Meera Syal.

Rani found the address for Syal’s agent in a book at Bradford Library, wrote to her heroine to tell her how she had inspired her, and, deliciously, received a reply. Thirty-three years later, the two women sit down together for the debut episode of Rani’s new non-BBC podcast Sisters of Defiance – Syal now a dame, Rani one of the BBC’s most lively and familiar broadcasters.

But their success stories haven’t been simple, which is partly why this podcast exists. Its tagline asks: “What happens when women stop playing safe?” and this first episode explores how two British-Asian women have navigated cultural expectations, generational trauma and divorce “in a culture where it’s still seen as a very dirty word”, Rani explains. The show is built around moments of defiance, though Rani understates this in her meditative introduction. Perhaps this is deliberate – a canny way of easing listeners towards the tougher subjects to come.

The first episode takes off 16 minutes in when Syal talks about her Indian Punjabi father’s experience of the bloody aftermath of partition in Lahore when he was 13. On the 50th anniversary of this horror in 1997, “without a memorial, without a museum, without marking”, as Syal puts it, she pitched the idea for a documentary that would take her father back home. “Not one television company was interested,” she says. “Not one.”

The women then movingly discuss how intergenerational trauma has shaped expectations of their lives. “You begin to understand where the fear comes from, why [parents] want to control you, why they want everyone to get married... because they have been through utter chaos and terror and they know the world can flip them upside down in a second,” Syal says. There’s also a startling moment when Rani admits, post-divorce, that she realised “nobody cares whether I’m happy or sad”, after which she apologises sweetly to her parents.

The podcast is supported (although the verb Rani uses is “nourished”) by midlife wellness brand Ancient + Brave, and throughout the show a spiritual note is struck that might not be for everyone. But hey, so many podcasts are sponsored, and Rani so exudes energy and vitality that this knackered writer is willing to take it on board. Other impressive guests on the lineup include Gisèle Pelicot, comedian Fatiha El-Ghorri and musician Anoushka Shankar.

Across BBC Radio 3 and 4 this week, you haven’t been able to move for Miles Davis. Born a hundred years ago on 26 May, his musical innovations have been celebrated well on Radio 3’s Composer of the Week by the always excellent Kate Molleson, and in The Essay, where Kevin Le Gendre examines Davis as an early tech adopter, political activist and fashionista.

Davis is also the subject of Radio 4’s latest Legend series, following previous revelatory seasons about Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen. The actor and music-lover Clarke Peters is at the helm – he previously presented the 2021 Radio 4 series Black Music in Europe: A Hidden History, which is fabulous, and still online. His voice, like Davis’ trumpet, is all-enveloping, and the series begins with the two of them dancing around each other in a gorgeous improvisation, against the flickering rhythms of a lit stove. “His first memory was of a flame… flickering, dancing,” Peters intones. “That flame was a blueprint for the rest of his life.”

Producers Loftus Media superbly deploy various atmospheres throughout – from my car in rural Wales, I felt transported to bebop clubs, composer Gil Evans’s New York basement flat below a Chinese laundry, and the banks of the Seine with Davis and actress and singer Juliette Gréco, his lover in the late 1940s. It reminded me of ambitious American imports, which may point to the BBC’s wider, commercial ambitions.

This week’s musical Between The Ears episode also crackles with magic. Tides of Sound: The Story of St. GIGA tells of a Japanese radio station that ran from 1991 to 2003, without any DJs, commercials or news, instead synchronising ambient and classical music with field recordings and poetry around the natural rhythms of the tides. The station intended to “guide mankind into the approaching 21st century”, and this half-hour beautifully recreates its echoes and flows, still showing the world how welcome it is to have a break from the noise.

Photographs by Stuart C Wilson/Getty Images, Express Newspapers/Getty Images